Members of the public who want to send their name to Mars on NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission can get a souvenir boarding pass and their names stenciled on chips to be affixed to the rover. Sign up here. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech. NASA is giving the public an opportunity to send their names – stenciled on chips – with the Mars 2020 rover mission. The rover is scheduled to launch as early as July 2020, with the spacecraft expected to touch down on Mars in February 2021. NASA will use an electron beam to stencil the submitted names onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair (75 nanometers). At that size, more than a million names can be written on a single dime-sized microchip. The chip (or chips) will ride on the rover under a glass cover. From now until September 30, you can add your name to the list (and obtain a souvenir boarding pass to Mars) here. NASA said that the robotic rover will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet's ...

A natural color view of Pluto, as seen by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. New research adds to the evidence for a subsurface ocean beneath Pluto's ice crust. Sputnik Planitia is the region of smoother-looking nitrogen ice in the middle right of the image. Image via NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker. At least several moons in the outer solar system are now known or suspected to have subsurface oceans beneath their cold, icy surfaces. Scientists also think that the dwarf planet Pluto may have one as well, based on data from the 2015 flyby of NASA's New Horizons mission. How can this little, frozen, rocky ball much farther out than Neptune have an ocean? Now, new research by scientists in Japan and the U.S. adds more evidence for this intriguing possibility. The findings were announced in a joint press release from Hokkaido University, Earth-Life Science Institute at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokushima University, Osaka University, Kobe University and the University of California, Santa Cruz. The ...

The near side of the moon (left) looks very different from the far side. Image via NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter/GSFC/Arizona State University/Slate. We've all heard that the moon keeps a single face toward Earth. And, as the spacecraft images at top show, the moon's two faces – its near side and far side – look very different from each other. The moon's far side is heavily cratered, but noticeably lacking the broad, dark, lower-lying basins, the lunar "seas" or maria, that make up the familiar face of the man (or lady, or rabbit) in the moon. Over the past several decades, since we humans first sent our spacecraft around the back side of the moon, astronomers have put forward various ideas to explain the difference between the moon's two hemispheres. The American Geophysical Union announced a new study on May 20, 2019, based on new evidence about the moon's crust, suggesting the differences were caused by a wayward dwarf planet colliding with the moon in the early history of the solar system. A ...

Right, the moon's near side, and the landing sites of spacecraft sent by various countries. Left, the moon's far side, and the landing site of China's Chang'e 4, the only spacecraft to have visited it so far, in January 2019. The color scale depicts the altitude of the lunar surface. Notice Chang'e 4 is sitting inside a huge crater. Image via Nature. On January 3, 2019, a Chinese spacecraft called Chang'e 4 became the first-ever mission to land on the moon's far side. It set down in a giant impact feature on the moon, called the South Pole-Aitken Basin, within a smaller and newer impact crater, called Von Kármán. Last week (May 15, 2019), Chinese scientists published early scientific results from the Chang'e 4 mission, after collecting the first in situ data from the crater floor. These scientists report the detection of materials near Chang'e 4 landing site that they said "differ markedly" from most samples from the moon's surface. They said they believe it's possible this material came from deeper ...

Before and after comparison of the landing site. Date in lower left indicates when the image was taken. It appears the spacecraft landed from the north on the rim of a small crater, about a few meters wide, leaving a dark "smudge" on Mare Serenitatis that's elongated towards the south. Image via NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University. Last week (May 15, 2019) NASA released a series of photographs that show the impact site of Israel's Beresheet moon lander. The washing machine-sized probe crashed into the moon on April 11, 2019, after a malfunction caused its descent engine to shut down during its attempt to land. The photos were taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The "after" image of the impact site – on an ancient lunar volcanic field called the Sea of Serenity (Mare Serenitatis) – was captured on April 22, 11 days after the crash, as soon as LRO's orbit placed it over the spacecraft's attempted landing site. In the image, you can see a dark smudge where Beresheet landed. No smudge is ...

Artist's concept of water vapor molecules being ejected into space from Mars. Scientists have found a new water cycle on the planet, where water vapor can be transported into the upper atmosphere and even at times escape into space. Image via NASA/GSFC/CU/LASP. Scientists have discovered a new type of water cycle on Mars, which is a bit surprising given the generally severe lack of water on the planet. According to a new study, water vapor rises from the lower atmosphere to Mars' upper atmosphere, and some of it even escapes into space, but this can only happen under very limited conditions. This finding may also help explain how Mars lost most of its water billions of years ago. The intriguing new results were published in the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters on April 16, 2019, by researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. Computer simulations showed that, ...

The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) captured this image of irregular galaxy NGC 4485. The young blue stars and star-incubating pinkish nebulas on its right side indicate active star formation, caused by a close encounter with another galaxy. Meanwhile, on its left side, you can see hints of the galaxy's earlier spiral structure. Image via NASA/ESA/HubbleSite. Isn't this a beautiful and dynamic image? NASA and ESA released it on May 16, 2019. It's an irregular galaxy called NGC 4485, seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy, HubbleSite said: … shows all the signs of having been involved in a hit-and-run accident with a bypassing galaxy. Rather than destroying the galaxy, the chance encounter is spawning a new generation of stars, and presumably planets. The right side of the galaxy is ablaze with star formation, shown in the plethora of young blue stars and star-incubating pinkish nebulas. The left side, however, looks intact. It contains ...

Artist's concept of a planet being destroyed by gravitational forces from its dying star, which is turning into a white dwarf. Some planets might be able to escape this fate, however, according to a new study from the University of Warwick. Image via CfA/Mark A. Garlick. When a star dies, which of its planets have the best chance of surviving? It turns out that the smallest and densest rocky worlds would be the most likely to escape a crushing, fiery fate. This was the conclusion of a new study by astrophysicists at the University of Warwick in the U.K., who published their findings in the peer-reviewed Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on May 1, 2019. The scientists describe their research as a "survival guide for exoplanets" that outlines how different kinds of planets would fare when their host star dies and turns first into a red giant and then a white dwarf, the hot, burnt-out core of the once-active star. Massive-enough stars would ultimately explode as supernovae, blasting their ...

Artist's concept of Haumea's ring as it might appear from the dwarf planet's surface. Image via Sylvain Cnudde/SIGAL/LESIA/Observatoire de Paris. It's not just the biggest planets in our solar system that have rings; some smaller solar system bodies are known to have rings as well, including the dwarf planet called Haumea, orbiting in the Kuiper Belt, usually farther from the sun than Pluto. In fact, Haumea is the most distant known ringed object in our solar system, so far. Astronomers discovered Haumea's rings in 2017. The rings are so faint that we can infer their presence only when they pass in front of a more distant star, temporarily blocking the star's light from view. So you can imagine these rings are difficult to study. Now, a new study by scientists in Brazil is providing some new insights. Othon Cabo Winter led the study, which offers clues as to how the ring formed and how it remains in a nice stable circular orbit around such a small planetary body. The study was announced by Agência FAPESP ...

The moon, Mars and Venus rising over Earth's horizon. Image via ESA/NASA. This article is reprinted from the European Space Agency (ESA) One has a thick poisonous atmosphere, one has hardly any atmosphere at all, and one is just right for life to flourish – but it wasn't always that way. The atmospheres of our two neighbors Venus and Mars can teach us a lot about the past and future scenarios for our own planet. Rewind 4.6 billion years from the present day to the planetary construction yard, and we see that all the planets share a common history: they were all born from the same swirling cloud of gas and dust, with the newborn sun ignited at the center. Slowly but surely, with the help of gravity, dust accumulated into boulders, eventually snowballing into planet-sized entities. Rocky material could withstand the heat closest to the sun, while gassy, icy material could only survive further away, giving rise to the innermost terrestrial planets and the outermost gas and ice giants, respectively. The ...